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Seminar: Improving User Engagement in Live Collaborative Creation

Event Date:

Tue, 2018-03-20 09:30 - 10:45

Location: McBryde 655
Speaker: Sang Won Lee

Abstract:
Creating an artifact, such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a music piece, is often limited to those who have relevant domain knowledge. As a consequence, it remains a challenge to effectively involve non-expert end users in such creative processes. My research focuses on creating interactive systems that support live creation and collaboration, in which the process of creating an artifact is visible in real time to end users and invites them to collaborate with other people. These systems help preserve our natural expressivity, support real-time communication, and facilitate participation in the creative process. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants can collaborate to create artifacts such as GUI prototype, software, and music performances. For example, one of the systems that I developed enables large-scale audience participation at a public concert, where audience members collaboratively perform a music piece using their smartphones. My thesis work has explored three topics regarding live creation and collaboration: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barrier of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserve liveness in the creation process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts. Enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems will invite broader population to be part of creative practices.

Bio:
Sang Won Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. His work lies at the intersection of Human-computer Interaction and computer music. His research aims to bring the collaborative live nature of music making to computational systems by developing interactive systems that facilitate real-time collaboration in creative tasks. His work explores how to computationally mediate musical collaboration and enable novel musical expression. More broadly, he has applied the findings from interactive music to applications in a variety of fields, including crowdsourcing, design, writing, and programming. These systems help people collaboratively create artifacts and have liveness in their collaborative process with other people. He holds a Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the Seoul National University and an M.S. degree in Music Technology from Georgia Tech. He has been an active author in op-tier computer music conferences like New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), as well as broader Human-computer interaction venues like ACM UIST and ACM CHI. In addition to academic research publications, he has also presented his research in the form of music performances in peer-reviewed venues such as NIME, Art-CHI, and ICMC, and is a winner of the International Computer Music Association - Music Award 2016 for his composition, Live Writing: Gloomy Streets.